As of last night I had this round-up all ready to go. I mean, I still needed to do the writing, but I had picked a selection of music from five new releases that I thought would go really well together, and they all had fine cover art too. And then this morning I found some more just-released gems within the Niagara Falls of e-mails that crashed into our in-box overnight. What to do?

As you can tell, I decided to turn this mid-week round-up into a two-parter. Part 1 sticks with what I decided to do last night. Part 2 will include the new stuff I spotted this morning. Part 2 isn’t written yet, which means you won’t see it ’til tomorrow. Something else will probably hit our in-box overnight that will make it even longer.

MAZE OF SOTHOTH (Italy)

We’ve had a six-year gap since this band’s debut album Soul Demise, which we premiered here and reviewed here. But at last they have a new full-length named Extirpated Light that’s headed our way on March 24th via Everlasting Spew Records. And based on the first single, it sounds like the intervening years have brought some changes in their sound, which Metal-Archives previously labeled Technical Death Metal, even though that label was missing a lot of necessary nuance. Continue reading »